CNN and LeBron James' documentary on Tulsa 1921 will complete task begun by 'Watchmen' and 'Lovecraft Country'
Tulsa May 31-June 1, 1921. 18 hours of pure carnage, an orchestrated attack on the ground and by private aircraft, destroying more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest Black community in the United States, with a prosperous business area known as "Black Wall Street". In segregated Tulsa, most of the city’s 10,000 Black residents lived in this self-contained, middle-class, and prosperous neighborhood called Greenwood with bankers, lawyers, doctors, and business owners owning homes, land, and storefront properties. There was not one Black newspaper but two - the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun, a movie theater, library, churches, grocery and clothing stores, photo studios, cafes, and restaurants.
The 'inciting' incident happened on May 30, 1921, when a young Black teenager named Dick Rowland entered an elevator at the Drexel Building, an office building on South Main Street. Moments later, the young White elevator operator, Sarah Page, screamed. Rowland fled the scene and was later arrested. Rumors of what supposedly happened on that elevator had circulated through the city’s White community, fueled by an inflammatory front-page story in the Tulsa Tribune. It wasn't long after that the white mob, armed by city officials, destroyed Greenwood, going on on a killing, burning, looting spree. White women showed up with shopping bags to carry the loot while their men carried the guns.
And Rowland? Hours after Greenwood was destroyed, all charges against him were dropped. The police concluded that Rowland had most likely stumbled into Page, or stepped on her foot. He left Tulsa and never came back.
As the shameful 100th anniversary of the race massacre approaches, we will finally get to see some of the material that was purposefully and strategically erased to help America have collective amnesia about the event. LeBron James' company SpringHill and CNN Films will produce 'Dreamland: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street'. The documentary will examine what happened in late May and early June, using a mix of archival media, contemporary interviews, and narrated elements such as letters and diary entries. It will also include footage of the century-long search for physical evidence of the massacre that authorities and powerful people tried to erase from historic books. The film is to be completed in early 2021 and will probably be released to coincide with the anniversary.
For decades, there has been no public ceremonies or memorials. Instead, there has been a deliberate effort to cover the whole incident up. The Tulsa Tribune removed the front-page story of May 31 that sparked the chaos from its bound volumes, and scholars later discovered that police and state militia archives about the riot were missing as well.
As a result, until recently the Tulsa Race Massacre was rarely mentioned in history books, taught in schools, or even talked about. A bill in the Oklahoma State Senate requiring that all Oklahoma high schools teach the Tulsa Race Riot failed to pass in 2012. It was only in 2020, with the anniversary approaching that Oklahoma’s Education Department decided to add the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to its curriculum for the first time.
So why did it take nearly 100 years for Tulsa 1921 to become a cultural touchstone? Part of the reason is the strategic way in which the evidence was erased -- something that 'Dreamland' hopes to rectify.
The first public ceremony was a small event in 1996, the 75th anniversary, where a service was held at the Mount Zion Baptist Church and a memorial was placed in front of Greenwood Cultural Center. Most Tulsa residents, besides descendants of those affected, didn't even know something like the race massacre had happened.
It was only in 2001, after the report of the Race Riot Commission was released, that the event even began to counter the decades of news blackout. The report stated that between 100 and 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 people made homeless over those 18 hours in 1921.
Once the report's findings went public, the findings began to be published in mainstream journals and media outlets. What was mostly known only in academic circles began to gain wider media attention. 'Watchmen' creator Damon Lindelof read about Tulsa 1921 in one of these articles -- 'The Case for Reparations' by Ta-Nehisi Coates published in 2014 by 'The Atlantic'. It inspired him to come up with the recreated Tulsa Race Massacre in the first episode of 'Watchmen' in 2019.
And with that Tulsa 1921 was thrust into the cultural spotlight and popular consciousness. After that, came the recent 'Lovecraft Country', Misha Green's 'protest art' show that had one of its most damaged and traumatized characters, Montrose says the words "Smells like Tulsa". It devoted a whole episode to the Tulsa Massacre's gruesome fallout on the subsequent generations of Black Americans.
Tulsa 1921 Race Massacre is an excellent example of how the immediacy of popular and populist culture and art can often achieve what decades of scholarly or journalistic work, reports, and commissions cannot do. Get people to care deeply and passionately about righting wrongs that happened long ago but which still, structurally, shape events, attitudes and biases today. It is only after a 'Watchmen' or a 'Lovecraft Country', that the LeBron James documentary makes sense.
Before 'Watchmen', there have been other attempts to brings Tulsa 1921 to screen by figures like John Legend and Oprah Winfrey -- but their exclusive focus on the massacre meant they never would reach a mass audience. However, with 'Watchmen'and 'Lovecraft Country', Tulsa 1921 was part of a larger pop culture narrative. After they have done their work and cleared the space for the conversation, it is time for the scholarly and journalistic documentary work to finally find the light of day with 'Dreamland: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street'.